CINDY SHERMAN, Untitled Film Still #65. 1980 Gelatin Silver print

Expanding Fields :

MOCA’s   Collection  1940s-1970s – Summer 2026

Stepping out   by Rosanna Albertini

It was not so long ago. About 40 years? Half of my life. Contemporary art pushed philosophical thoughts, academic career aside and became the center of my work. Time is slow if nothing changes in life, becomes a storm if a person steps down the stairs like Cindy Sherman’s figurine, wondering if really is she turning her back to the walls of history, books and sacred art that dominated her country. I was craving for physicality and the taste of the present. Understanding will happen, at a certain moment, I told myself. Or not. Let’s try. In my first review of two museum exhibitions for an Italian newspaper, L’Unità, the piece was written as if having  the same tactile experience of a snail sliding on the tables, bundles of branches and igloos by Mario Merz. To shrink in the scale of a small living animal cleans up terrors and uncertainties. It was my first attempt of opening a new mental space and learning from meeting people and artworks.  Viktor Shklowskij and Gertrude Stein had paved my way with revelations about writing and making art. Many more followed.

Forty years after, after descending the steps at  Los Angeles MOCA, the art pieces selected from the Museum’s  collection filled my mind with the same emotions that had steadily transformed me in the first place. No regrets. Two years working in Paris and in French art schools gave to me the clear perception that Europe and the US were different planets. Italian, I was a partial observer distant from both. In the late Eighties American artists had access to French museums for the first time. Naturally, often regarded with suspicious attitudes. First time for Turrell, Donald Judd, Bruce Naumann, Mike Kelly, the minimalists, conceptual artists. American video art, instead, was well known: Dany Bloch, curator at the Musée de la Ville de Paris, had been the first in Europe organizing exhibitions of body art and video art since the Seventies. 

Yes, you might be impatient, but this is not a review. I wish I can bring here all the excitement,  curiosity, and the passion many of us had for exploring an enormous banquet of arts challenging a traditional and dusty cultural mentality that exposed many of us to the public doubt about the appealing of the ‘new.’ In Locarno (Switzerland), after watching the very first presentation of Art of Memory by Woody Vasulka, I was sitting with my poet friend Luigi Serravalli, who lived in the Dolomites. He jumped up in all the highness of his angular body, loudly  announcing: “We saw a masterpiece!” It was a sort of gold digging.

Sometimes my editor  -I was correspondent from Paris-  whispered to me: are you sure these installations, computer and video art, really exist? She was right, such a deep separation from daily routines, but the same was true for contemporary art in Italy and elsewhere. Piero Manzoni as foreigner as Woody Vasulka and the Fluxus people, also for me, before the break. Still, the most diffused common sense was that contemporary art was nor ART. I could reassure my editor telling her that Nam June Paik’s robots, in Paris, shared the same room with the La Fée Electricite´ by Raoul Dufy,  1937. I’m not sure the present is different. Around the living artists and their works there is a small tribe. I was born  in it, as my grandfather was a painter, I will never quit. This is a little story from my tribe, once I moved to Los Angeles in the early Nineties. 

NANCY YOUDELMAN, Leaves, A Self Portrait, 1973

Now I see myself as I was then in Nancy Youdelman’s Leaves, A Self Portrait, 1973. But I must reverse the order of the six photos: I arrived covered with dry leaves – words and habits and cultural stereotypes – and gradually found a different way of being Italian, in the foreign city that became home. The major metamorphosis happened while working with American artists: Allan Ruppersberg, Paul McCarthy,  Chris Burden, John Baldessari at first, and later many others, Jim Shaw, Tim Hawkinson, Michael C. McMillen, Kim Abeles, Karen Carson, followed by a big number of young and old women artists to whom I dedicated the last twenty years of writing and bookmaking. From Rachel Mason to Simon Forti.

ALLAN SEKULA, Untitled Slide Sequence, 1972

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, Interview, 1955

PAUL McCARTHY

JOHN BALDESSARI, Concerning Diachronic-Synchronic Time: Above, On, Under (with Mermaid), 1976

JIM SHAW, Untitled, 1079

GREGORY WILEY EDWARDS, For the Ashes of the Seven Headed Cobra, 1975

It was  surprising to be asked to work with UCLA students for who I was, free to express my reaction to the artworks and help them to be themselves at the best in their projects. The same I used to do with my philosophy students in Italy. Paul McCarthy was the best listener of graduate students. To be with him during the visits was a pleasure I didn’t forget. I could continue forever…. on my side, there was, there is  gratitude.  For the freedom to write without obstacles, and discovering a little more of myself through the work. With Mark Rothko, I would say  I’m not interested in style or aesthetic, “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions.” (p. 119 MR, Writings on Art)

The Rothko’s pieces on display at MOCA contain the artist’s passionate expression of clarity and the eye of Giuseppe Panza, the collector who spent years in the US observing and trying to understand Minimalist art in America. He bought them but, in the end, gave them to Los Angeles MOCA. Europe is not yet ready for Rothko. I’m glad they are here, I’ve locked them in my mind.

Let’s read Rothko’s words in 1949:

“ The progression of a painter’s work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity: toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and the observer. As examples of such obstacles, I give (among others) memory, history and geometry, which are swamps of generalization from which one might pull out parodies of ideas (which are ghosts) but never an idea in itself. To achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood.”

I add some other images of the MOCA’s exhibition with no intention to explain them.  Each of them irradiates stories and feelings, is art and life and a landscape of ideas  I’m glad to revisit with love. I give to Robert Musil the task of finishing. It is from him I learned no to be scared of the infinite network of emotions on which ideas are never at rest.

MARK ROTHKO, No 9 (Dark over Light Earth/Violet and yellow in Rose) 1954

MARK ROTHKO, Purple Brown, 1957

“To love something as an artist, means to be shaken not by its ultimate value, but by a side of it that suddenly opens up. Where art has value  it shows things that few have seen. It is conquering, not pacifying.”

“An artist receives the impression that something he has avoided, some vague feeling, a sensation of stirring of his will, is dissolving in him, and its elements, released from the connection in which habit had frozen them. The result is at best mostly an imprecise notion of the process to be depicted, but surrounding it is a dim resonance of spiritual affinities, a slow undulation of further networks of emotions, will, and ideas.”

“What in reality remains fused together like a molten drop is here dissolved, untangled,  interwoven — made divine, made human.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ROBERT MUSIL, Precision and Soul © 1990 The University of Chicago Press, Paperback edition 1994 Essays 1918-1933 Edited and Translated by Burton Pike and David S. Luft.

MARK ROTHKO, Writings on Art Edited by Miguel Lopez-Remiro, © 2006 by Yale University. Yale University Press, New Haven and London.